sins: Let your constant prayer be, that you may be guided by the Spirit of Christ into the true practical meaning of the text; and then, when you do whatsoever you do in the name of Jesus Christ, you will infallibly prosper.

But I leave it with you, as one of the greatest and most important practical considerations of the Christian, that you never can prosper, you never will prosper, so long as you attempt to mix the ways of the world with the ways of true followers of Christ. Be patient with me; for while I live, and can lift up my voice in pleading the Redeemer's cause, ye shall hear this truth from me again and again. The World, the World, is, and always was, the bane of Religion. The two systems do not admit of a compromise; and those who attempt it, grieve the Spirit of God, cramp their spiritual enjoyments, defile the purity of them, injure their own usefulness, and, what is worst of all, they do so at the peril of losing their precious and immortal souls,

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SERMON IV.

HEB. xii. 14.

Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

ON the consideration of these words there arise two important questions: first, What is the scriptural meaning of the term holiness? and, secondly, What are the methods by which holiness is to be attained? Without it, no man, it is declared, shall see the Lord: it cannot be, therefore, but every wise man must be looking after it with all diligence. Yet it is equally plain that the first step of the wise man must be to inquire in what holiness consists.

I should entertain little hope of managing this subject profitably by laying down cold and formal definitions. In practical matters, that method does not succeed: nor do the holy Scriptures

furnish us with any such examples. Nevertheless, the Scriptures fail not, on any occasion, to communicate the instruction they would impress in such a way as not to be mistaken. So in the case before us: From the Sacred Oracles we collect that true holiness consists essentially in a conformity of our nature to the nature and will of God. Not that we find, throughout all the sacred pages, such a precise description of holiness as this; but we collect the thing to be so, from numerous passages where the word holy is used; and not seldom by contrast, where characters or practices opposite to what God enjoins or approves are described by the term unholy. In proving this by quotations, one might produce a large portion of the Bible.

Our great ancestor Adam was created not only with innocent, but with holy dispositions. Solomon says, "I have found that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions." In the fall of Adam, his posterity became depraved and corrupt: "The good man (says the Prophet Micah) is perished out of the earth, and there is none upright among men." It has, however, pleased Almighty God, in his

goodness and mercy, to restore penitent sinners, from their state of depravity and corruption and condemnation, to a state of holiness and favour, through the salvation which is in Christ Jesus. And these considerations of the fall of man, and

his restoration by the Gospel, are absolutely necessary for a Christian to form a right judgment of the nature of that holiness to which he is called by his profession, and without which he is not to see the Lord. For though it be very true that holiness, in its principle and foundation, is eternally the same thing, without the smallest variation in kind or degree, yet the practical marks by which holiness is to be known and distinguished from counterfeits, are very different, as viewed in Adam, an innocent upright being before his fall, and in his depraved posterity. As Adam, before his disobedience and fall, could know nothing of repentance, much less of faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ; so he must have been totally ignorant of the manner in which God, by the redemption that is in Jesus, has displayed his attributes of justice and mercy, of infinite hatred against sin, and of boundless compassion towards man. Adam, in his state of innocence, loved God for his

amiable perfections, and, no doubt, was grateful to him for the profusion of benefits with which he was surrounded in Paradise; but he could know nothing of God's love to us in Christ. God had not then commended his love to us, in that while we were sinners Christ died for us. Yet God is ever the same, yesterday, to-day, and to eternity. God is ever the same holy Being, whether he condemns, or whether he pardons, or whether he leaves men in a state of probation. We are therefore to keep in mind, that it is not the holiness of God we are inquiring after, but the holiness of man, and of fallen man. The holiness of man, as we have said, always consists in the conformity of his nature and will to the will of God; but it is the business of fallen man to examine, whether his will be in strict conformity 'to the will of God, as displayed in those glorious dispensations in which man himself, as a fallen creature, is more immediately and more peculiarly concerned. It is not enough for a fallen creature, alienated from God by wicked works, to content himself with talking largely, and perhaps with an almost unmeaning admiration, of the wonderful perfections of God, unless he has thoroughly